In early and mid-2025, a claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" resurfaced and circulated widely online, including on X, Reddit and Facebook.

Editor's note: Please see our updated and expanded coverage of this topic published in June 2025. On April 2, 2024, the claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" went viral on X ...

It felt like a kick in the stomach. Exploring an ancestry website, I discovered an 1860 Slave Schedule showing that my great-great-grandfather, William Henry Robertson of Mason County, Kentucky ...

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does ...

The North does not regard slaves as merely property, and can never be brought to do so under any circumstances; for such a concession would be to surrender their own control over Slavery within ...

Counties with more slaves in 1860 have higher gun ownership rates today, study finds A new study finds a peculiar correlation between rate of enslavement in the past and firearm ownership now ...

The remaining descendants of the last ship carrying enslaved Africans to land in the U.S. in 1860 met Saturday in Mobile, ...

Using the 1910 household census, the 1860 slave schedule, and the will of one of his ancestors, Reuters journalist Tom Lasseter finds that his forebears were slaveholders.

Erik Larson’s new book The Demon of Unrest, published this year by Penguin Random House, contains critical lessons for the fight against Trump and the threat of dictatorship today.

In early and mid-2025, a claim that "only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1860" resurfaced and circulated widely online, including on X, Reddit and Facebook.